ALDS Game 3: White Sox pitching stumbles, forces Game 4
· Yahoo Sports
Pitching wins championships. Through the first four games of this postseason, White Sox manager Will Venable’s pitching schemes had worked masterfully. Without using a traditional starter in the two wild card games in Houston or the first two games of the division series in Cleveland, he had his team within a win of the National League Championship Series for Game 3 at home.
This first game back in Chicago, with the chance to clinch a playoff series at home for the first time since the 1906 World Series and create memories not seen on the south side in decades, Venable’s pitchers faltered, helping to yield a 9-3 loss to the Guardians and a forced Game 4 on Thursday.
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Back-to-back games are not ideal for a staff that has benefited from having several days off after the wild card round and then a day off in between each of the first three divisional round games.
Winning and moving on with a series clincher on Wednesday would have given the White Sox until Monday to rest their pitching staff. But to some degree, the familiarity of the Guardians batters may have hurt them.
“We know how they like to deploy,” Cleveland Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said before Game 3. “They might do it in a different order, but we’re going to see who gets up in the bullpen so we can prepare. All of our hitters have faced all of their pitchers. We know them. They know it. So it is challenging, but we’re ready for it.”
As a rule, typical pitching roles go out the window in the postseason — between the two teams, there were 14 pitchers used on Wednesday — but without at least one true shutdown ace option on the White Sox staff, Venable has no choice but to get a little cute with his pitching roadmap.
His view of it, however, is not that he’s taking a unique approach, but rather that he is responding to the realities of the postseason with the staff that he has. In some ways, that’s how Venable has used his pitchers all season.
“I know, obviously, that we’ve been creative and have done different things to do whatever it takes to find the path to victory,” he said. “I think that the things that we’re doing have been done before and been done a lot. I don’t think that we’re necessarily doing anything innovative. I think whether it’s in the regular season or in the playoffs, teams do what they have to do to figure things out.”
In fairness to the White Sox pitching corps, their troubles were largely the four-run third inning, which put the offense behind early. By the time the Guardians added two runs in the eighth and two more in the ninth inning, the damage was already done. That four-run inning coupled with an offense that set a postseason record by striking out 19 times and stranded eight runners makes it very hard to win. And the margin for error in a playoff game is often razor thin as it is.
Matt Marton-Imagn ImagesThe absence of production from one of their most important hitters — Munetaka Murakami — was especially problematic in Game 3. Murakami accounted for three of the team’s strikeout total and otherwise grounded out to second base for an 0-for-4 day at the plate.
And Murakami was one of six White Sox batters who struck out multiple times. Colson Montgomery and Tristan Peters both also struck out three times apiece.
“They’ve got a good pitching staff. They played on the corners, and as soon as [Daniel] Espino struggled, they brought in Foster [Griffin] there, and he was tough to pick up,” Peters said.
The Sox scored in the first inning and looked poised to build a comfortable lead early, but Vogt’s short leash for his starter probably kept the White Sox lineup from getting much going. Griffin struck out seven Sox batters in 2 2/3 innings and kept them from fully responding after the four-run third inning.
There were a couple of prime opportunities, like when Kyle Teel lined out to second baseman Travis Bazzana and Miguel Vargas got doubled off at second to end a scoring threat in the fifth inning, or when Vargas’s hard-hit ball to third base with the bases loaded in the sixth turned into an inning-ending out.
After those two scoring chances, the Sox didn’t have another baserunner and racked up eight of their 19 strikeouts from the seventh through ninth innings.
If there’s a silver lining to how Wednesday turned out, it’s that Venable didn’t have to use some of his high leverage arms like Grant Taylor and Jordan Hicks. Both are capable of throwing multiple innings, which will probably be necessary, given that Venable had to use so many pitchers in Game 3.
Erick Fedde and Anthony Kay both also got the day off, so if Venable wants to treat Thursday like an elimination game, he can lean on those four arms to try and cover the needed 27 outs without going to anyone else in his pitching staff.
The big picture need for the White Sox on Thursday will be to turn the page quickly like they have done all season. They never lost more than four games in a row in the regular season, and that ability to not let losses stack up will play a role in Game 4.
Because whatever had happened in Game 3, Venable is going to have to be creative with his pitching staff for however long the White Sox are in the postseason. A win on Thursday will mean they get to the ALCS, the deepest they have gone in the postseason since winning the 2005 World Series.
“This is what we do all year. I think we are really good to bounce back the next day, and I think we’ve got short memory,” Vargas said. “A lot of times during the year, we lost tough games and we bounce back by the next day […] and that’s what we do.
“I think we’re going to be just fine for tomorrow for sure.”